My means of doing this depended on two of the best-established peculiarities of this strange force: its rectilinear direction and its conductibility.

We found that it acts through air or in a vacuum in a single straight line, without deflection, and seemingly without diminution.

Most solids, and especially metals, according to their electric condition, are more or less impervious to it--antapergic.

Its power of penetration diminishes under a very obscure law, but so rapidly that no conceivable strength of current would affect an object protected by an intervening sheet half an inch in thickness.

On the other hand, it prefers to all other lines the axis of a conductive bar, such as may be formed of [undecipherable] in an antapergic sheath.